just now i clicked to play spore and the screen is compleatly black, it does the opening sounds where you hear all the creaturs getting sucked into the galexcy but the screen is compleatly black!! any 1 elce have this or know what the problem is??

This happens to me too. I've tried everything I can think of, including the above. =(

I installed the game, logged in, and did the update to 1.01. The update worked fine, but now when I launch the game, the screen just stays black. There are sounds and I can alt-tab to close the game.

I unistalled Spore, installed latest DirectX (dxdiag says no problems), installed latest drivers, reinstalled spore. When I launch spore, the screen is still black. I can't even get to the update spore screen.